THE "OPEN SOURCE" so-called 'movement' (see Perens using that term, "movement") turned out to be a sham. It banned its own co-founder and Perens, the second co-founder, resigned in protest earlier this year. Ever since then he occasionally explains what went wrong. Richard Stallman speaks to him about it (he told me so).
"I frequently urge people to stop saying "Open Source". We need to speak about Software Freedom (or Free/libre software) instead."In 2020, for the first time in more than 15 years, I abandoned news about "Open Source" completely, seeing that the majority of them were just openwashing and promotion of proprietary prisons such as GitHub (Microsoft surveillance and censorship). To me, personally, "Open Source" is dead. It'll never come back. The label or the term "Open Source" is also increasingly meaningless. Many software licences that are called "Open Source" are not Free software-compliant. They're an openwashing slant to help sell proprietary software and/or mass surveillance in Clown Computing.
I frequently urge people to stop saying "Open Source". We need to speak about Software Freedom (or Free/libre software) instead. Any time we (still) say "Open Source" we help those who hijacked the term to push a toxic agenda, in effect helping a new-age monopoly by mass deception.
It's kind of sad in a way. It's difficult. For many years I did in fact use the term "Open Source"; so seeing what happened to it is frustrating. But it's too late to change that now. That's why Perens quit the OSI. That's why ESR went on the mailing list and fought back, only to be banned by the very organisation that he had helped found.
"Open Source" has always been a sham, but many assumed it to be well-meaning; Stallman was right about it. "I had an idea though about OSI and their push on their OSI-approved licenses," one reader told us earlier this week. She has been around this scene since the 1990s and she knows what really happened. And "still," she says, "when clearly they are long done... since Perens did say there were licenses that never should have been approved (and I never saw any effort to improve that situation after he said it...) and since he said there were loopholes - I will evaluate a few and write up an analysis."
In the meantime she left us with a bunch of relevant screenshots we cannot see (without a Microsoft account or spying by Microsoft). Notice these openwashers and people who speak of "virus" (in relation to a software licence, see image on the right). Those people are active in a Microsoft site (proprietary and surveillance) while claiming to do "Open Source".
Our reader thinks the whole thing is mostly a scam. Charlatans make money from the scam.
"Meeting people in real life was an eye opener! :) At SCaLE 15x in 2017," she recalls, "I attended the law track, where I met a Lawyer claiming to be a Free and Open Source Lawyer... who didn't know the difference. We did explain the difference to him during happy hour.
"Although IANAL, I knew more than the lawyers present who did not have the basic understanding of copyright - Example, they were arguing a moot point because they did not have basic knowledge of functional v speech."
Here are some more comments regarding OSI on Linkedin:
Richard Stallman once said:
"When I do this, some people think that it's because I want my ego to be fed, right? Of course, I'm not asking you to call it "Stallmanix"!"